Taking The Hard Road

Part I of Essay
Working class autobiographies “illuminated how social position, or location in social hierarchies, [were] internalized as identity” (Maynes 3). Where otherwise the only source of information of the past would be statistics and those of historians, the autobiographies give ....

Part II of Essay
.... Sebastian Commissaire is quoted as declaring in his autobiography, “workers don’t write memoirs.” Similarly, in order for a person to write an autobiography, he or she must have a particular reason begin writing in the first place. The numbers of autobiographies rise with the amount of influence of political and labor organizations (39). So there are difficulties in obtaining an autobiography by someone who has a full on working class perspective without the militancy, and even then, the perspective is distorted. Since the author is focused ....